The United States Constitution and Bill of Rights (all of them) still give me goosebumps.

Michelle and I recently saw these lovely drawings by a talented artist named Kuang Han (况晗). Mr. Kuang captures pencil drawings of the Beijing hutongs, old neighborhoods that are rapidly dwindling in the face of Beijing's growth and modernization. We plan to go back to the gallery and find the perfect one (or ones) to buy. (I especially like the blocky looking drawings like the first one below.)

You can see more here and here.

 

This is a beautiful and creatively done reinterpretation of Mario. I love it.

http://www.sharenator.com/Mario_Communist_Edition/

If you like this kind of thing, check out these great Mario wallpapers too.

Here is an interesting story of how the Allies hid maps, money, and escape tools in board games kits distributed to Allied POWs during WWII. An estimated 10000 POWs used the contents to escape Nazi camps.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/monopolys-hidden-maps-wwii-pows-escape/story?id=8605905

(Or should I say "...in which I grew up"?)

My brother, Ives (pronounced "eye-vus" not "eave" like you might think -- that's a story for another day), and his wife Aimee just moved back to Minnesota where we grew up. It's been great getting updates from Ives as he visits our old friends and haunts. This weekend he brought his lovely wife back to see our old house in Woodbury, a suburb just east of St. Paul.

We were the first owners of this house; I think the name of this particular design was "Highlander IV" (not sure why I remember that). We moved in in 1974, just in time for me start first grade at Royal Oaks Elementary, just a five minute walk away. At the time, we were in the new part of the Royal Oaks neighborhood with empty lots all around us. There was a lot on the corner next to us; on the other side of that lot was a very nice African-American family. I'm pretty sure that lot was one of the only ones in Minnesota in 1974 that sat between a Chinese family and an African-American family. It sat empty for a while until another nice family moved in.

We lived in this house until my sophomore year of college (just after my brother graduated from high school.) It was a really great place to grow up (in fact Woodbury's motto was "Woodbury -- A nice place to live"). There were lots of kids in the neighborhood; we played a lot in the big wooded park across the street, in the snow that drifted into huge piles (my kids are very jealous), and in the empty lots and houses under construction. Many of us stayed together from elementary school through high school; it's been great finding many of them again on Facebook.

Anyway, on to the photos.

All in the all, the house looks good after so much time; Ives tells me the neighborhood has aged well. Still, it's definitely changed since we lived there. I can't believe how huge that tree in the middle of the photo is; of course, we planted it 35 years ago. The garage door, front door, and shutters were all bright Chinese red when we lived there. We had brass lion heads on the doors too. Not sure what our neighbors thought about that, but I liked them.

We used to have an asphalt, two car driveway. I guess someone replaced it with a wider, concrete one. Good thing. It was a real PITA to re-surface the driveway every year. We also used to have a basketball net on the roof over the garage. Not sure why I'm not a better basketball player. The house seemed big at the time, but looking at it now, it's small compared to houses today including our current house. If I remember what my mom said, I think this house was about 1500 square feet plus a big basement and the garage.

I can't believe no one extended the tiny patio. I always wanted a big deck. We never had any furniture on the patio. I think the only thing we ever put on it was a pup tent because my dad didn't want us to kill the grass; obviously, it wasn't very comfortable in that tent...

There was a huge birch woodpile against the house where that garden is in the photo. We bought that pile soon after we moved in and never used all the wood by the time we moved out fourteen years later. My mom used to hang ducks to air dry where the current owners have that wind chime. (This is how you get crispy duck skin in roast duck.) I think the ducks were better than that wind chime. We didn't have gutters; as a result, we had awesome sheets of icicles hanging from the eaves in the wintertime.
 

That tree used to be the middle of our kickball/baseball diamond, about where the pitchers mound would be. It looks big enough now to put a treehouse in (which I really, really wanted) but of course it wasn't even big enough to climb when we lived there. There used to be willow trees at first and third, but they're gone now. (For completeness, home was by the patio and second was by the garden). Our lot was about a quarter acre -- pretty big for our neighborhood. On top of that, my parents both worked all day and weren't home; as a result, our yard wound up being the place a lot of our friends played. This yard was the scene of a lot of soccer, football, hotbox, nighttime gun battles, and epic water fights.

We had a huge garden in the far right of this photo. We grew a ton of veggies all summer long; my dad acted like we would starve if not for the produce from the garden. His favorite gardening activity, though, was walking through the supermarket pointing out how expensive all the veggies were and exclaiming how lucky we were to have it all for free. I will admit the veggies were good, although a person can only eat so much zucchini.

I have a lot of great memories from this house, which are all rushing back now that I'm seeing these photos (as evidenced by this stream-of-consciousness post). I'm lucky to have had a really great childhood. I'm glad my brother took these shots (thanks, Ives!)

For more than you ever wanted to know about Woodbury (and way more than I ever knew), check out the Wikipedia article. I can't believe the population is over 54,000 people; it was about 15,000 when we lived there.

Yesterday, September 5, was International Bacon Day. To celebrate this holy occasion, here are some fun, amazing, cool links to bacony resources that my friends have sent me over the years.

• Bacon Lip Balm
• "Bacon Makes Everything Better" t-shirt
  
• Bacon donuts
• Bacon Explosion (bacon wrapped sausage) and here
• Turducken wrapped in bacon (via Bacon Today)
• Bacon and long-life
• Bacon fail (from Failblog.org)
   
• Chocolate Bakon Martini
• Bacon iPhone holder
• Bacon-wrapped Twinkie Baconhenge
   
• Chocolate-Bacon Cupcakes
• The Holy Church of Bacon

Thanks to Craig, John, David, Kymberlee, Max, Jack, Kellie, Sandi, and Sylvain! I love my awesome friends!

Enjoy your bacon!

As I mentioned before, I love TEDTalks. I’ve been watching them a lot lately in the car and on flights via my Zune. I found this one especially entertaining. Sarah Jones delivers an amazing performance, acting out a pile of characters on stage. She really is even physically believable. Amazing.

As I've noted several times before, I'm no golfer, despite owning golf clubs and having played for years. I do enjoy it, but boy, am I bad. So, it should be no surprise that I didn't play super well yesterday when I teed it up at Newcastle Golf Club with my friends Chris and Kevin. Fortunately, it was yet another perfect Seattle summer day and the company was fun. Actually, despite the fact I was playing with Chris' old clubs for the first time (mine are in China), I hadn't really played in two years, and it's been a long time since I've played the Coal Creek course (excuse, excuse, excuse), I played surprisingly well (for me) -- at least I didn't hit myself or anyone else.

Like many golfers, I decided I would enjoy the game a lot more with a few drinks; the cute and very chatty cart girl was more than happy to mix some killer Bloody Marys up to ease my golf suffering. An Old Fashioned in the club house afterwards topped it off. Then, our families joined us for a birthday brunch for Kevin. Very, very nice...

Me with the stunning views of Lake Washington and downtown Seattle in the distance.

Mommy and Bambi loping across the course. I managed to avoid hitting them.
 

Kevin with his birthday treat.

Last Friday, I took Andrew (12) and Michael (9) to see the Mariners play the Indians at Safeco Field. We were there with our friends the Shirouzus, who are huge baseball fans. Even though the M's were blown out 0-9, I really enjoyed the evening. I forgot how much I like going to see baseball games live.

It was a very lovely evening -- not cold at all. You can see the Seattle skyline behind the stadium, bathed in the beautiful sunset colors.

Their son (and Andrew's classmate in Beijing) made a sign that they waved around between innings; alas, they were never picked up by the scoreboard cameras.

Of course, my kids were more excited about the free application Nintendo (part owners of the Mariners) made for the Gameboy DS; you can install it from stations all around the stadium. It's a pretty cool wireless app that allows you to see replays, watch where the pitches go, order food at your seat, see the stats from other games, view player stats, and play sports related games against other people in the stadium.

All in all, it was a great evening.

While we were at our friends' cabin near Bremerton, we watched a trio digging for geoducks. For the uninitiated, a geoduck is a huge clam-like animal with a gargantuan siphon which can grow up to a meter long. Although they are ugly, they are very tasty. (If you like sushi, you may know them by their Japanese name - mirugai.) As a result, people are willing to work pretty hard to get them.

They bury themselves pretty deep in the sand with their siphon sticking out the ground a little to breathe. Once in a while, they squirt water out like this:

Once you spot this, you dig like crazy into the mucky sand. Once you get a few feet deep, you need to keep the sand from collapsing into the hole, so you use a big pipe (really a sheet of plastic or thin metal rolled into a tube. Then, you reach into the tube and keep digging (these guys were using a little bowl for the last bit of digging.)

Finally, you can pull the geoduck out of the dirt and claim your prize. This is apparently a pretty small geoduck.